Citation:

Abstract:

The fifth anniversary of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in August–September 2007 passed largely unnoticed. Yet, ten years earlier the fifth anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit was marked by ‘Earth Summit II’, held in New York, and in 2002 the WSSD–or ‘Rio + 10’–was convened to review the progress made in the ten years since Rio. Despite this predilection for marking anniversaries, there was no ‘Jo’burg + 5’, and it will be 2016–2017 before the next overall review of progress, according to the programme of work of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD). Thus the ‘WSSD may well come to be seen as the last of the UN megasummits, where success is measured by the number of participating heads of state and the conference is preceded by years of negotiation’ (Bigg 2004, p. 4).